#import Pants.h

Here I sit, hunched over books of magic. I should balance out my time more, work on my own book for a while, clean things up and meet that bloody two-chapter milestone. But no, I hunger for knowledge now that I have tasted it, and must delve ever deeper into the hermetic arts of, erm, Cocoa programming. I demand a human-skull candle immediately

I like this book, Aaron Hillegass's Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (on loan from my benevolent editor), a lot. The introduction has a "How to Learn" section that suggests, among other things, getting 10 hours of sleep a night, and a reminder that caffeine is not a substitute for sleep. And there are exercises! The one at the end of this chapter, which I expect to work on till I dutifully fall alseep in a few hours, closes with the admonition "This is hard, and you are not stupid. Good luck!"

So, yes. I apologize to my local friends for being so antisocial lately. I have been in a bit of a larval state. Tomorrow I take a break from it, for it will be a koo-koo fun day day. And in another five weeks or so I will suddenly be a neighbor to many of you (or at least more of a neighbor than I am now, way way down here on the banks of the Charles). I haven't paused to let this sink in yet. I suppose that I won't until sometime after I'm done moving. Maybe at the housewarming.